Happy Food Revolution Day 2014! As I have in years past, I’m teaming up with a group of fellow food bloggers to celebrate this day with a communal project. The amazing people at the Jamie Oliver Food Foundation got in touch with my good friend Bettina of The Lunch Tray and asked her if she’d like to help organize something for this day; Bettina contacted me to ask if I’d join in; and since food and fun are always a case of “the more, the merrier,” we emailed blogging friends from across the country to get a group committed to our event.

This year’s theme is “Let’s Get Kids Excited About Food,” so we decided to get into the kitchen with our children and make them a central part of this year’s celebration. Each one of us cooked a meal or a part of a meal with our kids, which we’re sharing with you today:
Breakfast, made by Bettina Siegel of The Lunch Tray, with her son;
Snack, created by Grace Freedman of EatDinner.org, with her daughter;
Lunch, cooked by yours truly (or more accurately, by L. and P., with a little supervision from me);
And a multi-course dinner, including salad by Mia Moran of Stay Basic with the help of her three kids, entree by Sally Kuzemchak of Real Mom Nutrition (from her great new cookbook!) and her boys, and side dishes contributed by Caron Gremont of First Bites and her two children, and Lynn Barendsen of The Family Dinner Project, cooking with her sons.

We hoped to show, on this day, that getting kids into the kitchen and whipping up some excitement about healthy, real food isn’t a gimmick or a trick or something that we only do because it’s Food Revolution Day. Each of us takes pride in cooking with our children – or letting them cook for us – throughout the year. We believe in teaching the core principles of healthy eating, as well as the life skills of shopping for and cooking real food, because these are the most basic and necessary tools in our arsenal to reverse the disturbing national trends towards a junk-food lifestyle and pervasive health issues in the long term. Plus — and this is where I jump off the soapbox — it’s fun. Good food is fun. Cooking is fun. Kids love it, and even if they do sometimes drop a whole open jar of salad dressing on the floor when they’re trying to help, the togetherness and the memories are worth the hassle. Not that, uh, anything like that has ever happened in my kitchen….!

Without further ado, and with a HUGE thanks to my fellow contributors, I present you with a gift: Our free online cookbook, chronicling our collective efforts to get into the kitchen with our families and make some memories. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed creating it for you. Happy Food Revolution Day!